Now you can just drag images from your computer onto the Zistle site and it will instantly upload the image to Zistle.  It is so slick, I made a quick video demo to show you how it works.

Sorry for the weird watermark. We are cheap and didn’t buy the software – although we would definitely recommend screenflow to anyone. Very easy to use!

P.S. Right now this only works in the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, when IE10 is released it should be able compatible but until then you should try out something more modern.

New Trading Search

Searching for trade partners on Zistle is getting easier. First, you will notice an improved search experience in trading. In the example below, I have searched on the trading tab for ‘Celtics’. When the results are displayed, I can see which members want each card and who has it up for trade.

Instantly view trade matches

Not only will you be able to see a list of users who are trading or want the card, you will be to hover over their picture and instantly see trade matches.

It will show you matches on your wantlist, your tradelist and allow you to initiate a trade. You will be able to hover over a member icon in the trading tab as well as in your contacts.

You’ll also be able to see this information when viewing your wantlist or tradelist. In the example below, I am browsing my own wantlist and I can see which cards on my wantlist match a card up for trade. When I hover over the member’s profile pic, I can instantly see if we have enough trade matches for a trade.

Now you can just simply browse your wantlist and just mouse over any matches to see if you want to trade. This will make finding trade partners much easier.

We are making great progress toward being able to launch later this weekend. Stay tuned for updates about the launch. It will include some downtime and we will keep you updated on the blog.

Collection New Look and Feel

Similar to the rest of the site, the collections tab is getting a new look and feel that makes it easier to use. This includes inline pricing, a fixed sidebar for easy scrolling, multi-select and a detail pane.

Multi-Select and Bulk Actions

We want it to be as easy as possible for collectors to add their collection to Zistle. Now you’ll be able to select all cards, a group of cards or one by one and bulk add or remove them to your collection.

The controls will be very similar to selecting multiple files on your computer’s file system.

• Hold CTRL to select multiple cards
• Hold SHIFT to select multiple cards in a row
• Select ALL selects all cards on that page

Once those files are selected, you can add or remove them from your collection using our bulk edit feature. We also plan to add a way for you to add cards to your tradelist and wantlist if not in this release, in the near future.

Detail Pane

We have replaced our detail view with a detail pane that is completely integrated within both list and gallery view. Clicking on each card name will show a closable pane at the bottom of the page that will display all of the details that you used to see in the detail view and more.

In addition to the card image, team, card attributes, pricing and information about who added the card and images, you will be able to see trading information including who wants the card and has the card up for trade. There are also links to see that card and set in the library (more details soon on library). In addition to being able to show more content about the card, you will be able to click through cards one by one and get information without losing your context.

Card Notes

You may have noticed that card notes are no longer in the detail view.We’ve moved card notes to a new column in list view. When a card is in your collection and you hover over it in list view, a pencil icon will appear in the note column. If you click on the icon, a pop-up will appear that will allow you to add a new note.

When your note is saved, a note icon will appear that you can hover over and see your note anytime you are in list view. Pretty fancy, huh? This way, you can easily see which cards have a note and read it instantly.

We’d love to hear your feedback about any of these new features and improvements at http://feedback.zistle.com or in the comments. Our target is to roll out the next release in early June and we are making great progress toward that goal. We’ll be asking for some of you to be beta testers before we roll it out in full production. If you’re interested in helping us test the new version, email me at ashley@zistle .com or just add a comment below.

Zistle needs to be more social. One of the ways that we can do that is by making member activity on the site more visible. So we’ve added activity streams to the dashboard throughout the new site that will highlight member activity.

The above example only shows new members but you will see recent activity including box breaks, new sets being added to the library, new images being added and more.

Alerts – See what you need to do

We’ve also added alerts on your dashboard to make it easier to see changes and new items that require your attention. This will include trade proposal updates, new Zistle features, contact updates, library updates and more.

Alerts tell you information that you need to know or items that require your attention. You can delete them when you are finished with that item or keep them up as long as you’d like as a reminder.

Remember, if you have feedback go to our feedback page and let us know: http://feedback.zistle.com

Dashboard – New Look and Feel

The new Zistle will feature a more polished interface as well as a lot more features. One of the best features of the new site is that it will stretch to the size of your browser window, meaning more cards per page and more info for you to use.

Zistle Contacts

You’ve asked for more social features and we’ve heard you. Now you will be able to add trading partners or friends to your contacts. These contacts will always be listed on your dashboard for easy access. Clicking on a contact’s icon will bring you to their profile page, where you can browse their collection, wantlist and tradelist and initiate a trade.

You can also search your contacts if you know who you are looking for. Simply start typing the Zistle member’s username and a drop down will appear with matching contact names.

New and Improved Messages

We are excited to announce an improved messaging system. It is not simply a facelift (which it desperately needed), you can know bulk edit your messages and remove messages from your inbox.

We’ve also added a subject line to make it easier to have multiple messages from the same Zistle member. Clicking on the message from your inbox will show an easy to read message thread that you can respond to right within the screen.

We are pretty excited about the improvements to the messaging system. We want it to be easy to send messages to other members and we’ve hard to improve this experience.

Stay tuned for another blog post on new features coming to Zistle and let us know if you have any ideas or feedback on what you’ve seen here on our new feedback site http://feedback.zistle.com.

Main Set now appears on top and is automatically created for new sets

These were feature on Zistle before we rebuilt the site and they are finally back. Rather than having to scroll down to the middle of the long list of subsets, Main Set will automatically appear on the top rather than in alphabetical order. Also, if you are creating a new set, you no longer have to create the Main Set subset – it is automatically done for you.

Add team easily in list view

This is another feature that existed on the old Zistle and is back by popular demand. We have made it easier to quickly add team to a card in list view. In case you are new to the site – here is how it works.

In list view, when a team has not been assigned a blue ‘add team’ link will appear in the team column. If you click the link, a text box will appear where you can begin typing any part of the team name and it will auto-populate a list of matching teams.

Simply select the team from the drop-down list and just like that you have added the team. If you make a mistake and select the wrong team, you will need to flag the card in order to change it.

Making Bulk Import Cards a little more user friendly

One of our major new features for the latest release of Zistle was adding a way for users to mass import cards into the Zistle library. This was a pretty big feature for us and one that we have been talking about for a long time. I was recently trying to fix some issues with Bowman Chrome and realized that we could make importing cards a lot more user-friendly.

The first thing that we did is made the formatting guidelines for importing cards appear in a new tab rather than opening in the pop-up. If you had a question about how to format your CSV file, the link for formatting guidelines would open in the pop-up. It didn’t fit very well and to go back to the import page, the user had to close the window and start all over again. What a pain! Now, if you want to double check the formatting before importing your cards, the guidleines will display in a new tab and you can easily go back and import the cards.

Which brings us to our second improvement: Zistle will now auto-populate the year, set and subset that you are currently viewing when you are importing cards. Before, if you were adding cards to 2010 Topps Main Set and decided to bulk import, you would have to add that information again. Now that information will automatically appear although you can change it if you are not on the right subset.

One thing I noticed while I was importing cards was that occasionally I would forget to add the file before clicking submit. I would get an error and the wondow would close. What happened? Did the site break? Nope – I just forgot to add the file. I would have to click import cards again, enter in the subset again and do it all over again. Now if you forget to add the file, red text will appear notifying you that a file must be selected to continue. Whew – much easier.

Our hope is that we can give you regular updates on what we are working on behind the scenes to make Zistle. I know we can disappear sometimes working on the site and you won’t hear from us for several weeks and it isn’t always bovious what we are working on. We know you want to hear from us more often and we are working on that. Thanks for being a part of Zistle and helping us make it better.

So when DaClyde offered to share his collection of 30,000 images with Zistle as long as he didn’t have to add them individually – we were ecstatic but also knew that we needed a way to solve this problem once and for all. With a little testing we were able to come up with a solution that has worked beautifully – thanks in part to DaClyde’s meticulous organizational skills. Literally some of our sets have gone from zero pictures to being 99% complete. Let’s just take a second to relish in the beauty of the 1987 Topps Set…

And all 53 pages of the main set look that way with a few exceptions. Wow! We feel extremely lucky to have such generous contributing members and we appreciate your patience while we come up with a solution for everyone. In the meantime if you have complete sets or a large collection that is well organized and would like to save yourself from getting carpel tunnel – please let us know. Ideally – the cards for any given subset would be in their own directory and the names of the cards would be the card number. However – we can most likely work with any organizational scheme.

Thanks for all of your hard work – we’re getting there.

This post is really meant to quell your fears as well as address some of the issues that are facing Zistle and how we plan to move forward in 2010. First of all, Zistle is not being shut down. We haven’t abandoned you or the site. What in fact has been going on behind the scenes is a long and involved conversation about how to take Zistle to the next level. Here are the major challenges that we are facing.

Larger capacity

If you are a member that has a large collection or wantlist on Zistle, you are no stranger to error codes. This is unacceptable to us but we frankly do not have the bandwidth to support it. The immediate fix to the problem is to pay for more bandwidth but this is not a real solution since this is a cycle that will just perpetually continue.

Zistle needs to stay free but have a path to sustainabilty

Our love for Zistle is deep but it is obvious that at some point Zistle will become a financial burden for us. We are committed to keeping Zistle free but it is also important that the site breaks even monetarily. This is our goal for 2010. We have ideas for how to make this possible and as always, we will be asking you for your feedback, thoughts and suggestions. Stay tuned.

More members

Zistle is only as good as the members of the site. We know that having more members is not only our  key to growth but also the only way to give our current members the best experience possible. Many of you have reached out with great ideas on how to increase membership and you will see us implementing some of them this year. In addition, we will be working harder to engage with the users that we do have to keep them excited about the site.

Better Data

While we have a great start and we have some rockstar members who have devoted so much of their time to add to the database, there are still major holes and we can’t expect you to fill them by hand. To tackle this issue, we plan to build more sophisticated tools for you to enter information and make it easier for us to edit and update changes on the back end.

More access

One issue for many of you has been the inability to export or print your information. While most of you trust us, we also understand that it is frustrating to not be able to access your data the way you want. This is an issue that we will be tackling head on. We appreciate your patience in waiting for this feature.

After reading all of that, these challenges might seem obvious and you might even ask yourself why I would take the time to write all of this down and make you read it. While the challenges are obvious the solution is not and this is what we have been struggling with for the last six months. We have decided that to face these challenges and reach our goals for the site that we will need to actually rebuild the site in a different platform. It may sound scary but Josh has convinced me that this is not only the best course of action but the fastest as well. Please don’t be scared by the proposition. Your data will be safe and Zistle will be better when it is completed. We are confident that this will allow us to not only implement many of the features that you have been asking for but also make Zistle a faster, easier to use site. If you made it this far in the post – thanks for taking the time to be a part of Zistle. 2010 is going to be a great year.

Also, there have been many excellent ideas shared through the feedback tool. If you haven’t checked out what people are saying, it might be a good time to peruse the ideas and let us know your thoughts. It can be hard to justify adding a feature if only one person is asking for it. Even just indicating which ideas you really like can be extremely helpful for us in determining the next feature to add. Keep telling us what you think. We are listening!